Sinners and Shrouds, first published in 1955 as an Inner Sanctum Mystery, is a fast-paced, action-packed novel by master crime-writer Jonathan Latimer (1906-1983). The story centers on newspaper reporter Sam Clay, who becomes his own story when he wakes up next to a corpse and with no memory of the woman’s identity and of what took place the previous night. Clay knows that he is being framed for the murder but has to prove this—both to himself and to the police. Reporter Sam Clay had awakened in a strange room with a hangover and a blonde. The hangover was ugly and the blonde was dead! After a fast check Sam realized that he was the fall guy in a first-class frame-up. Then he heard the maid coming into the apartment. So he picked up a half-filled bottle of brandy and slipped into the closet. Sam didn’t make a practice of knocking women unconscious with bottles. But this was an emergency. When the maid turned her back... bang! He let her have it. As she sank to the floor with a moan, Sam wondered just how long he could stay one jump ahead of the cops!
On a mad mission in the African jungle, a photographer loses his way Lew Cable is an impulsive man, lazy and violent, especially when he has been drinking. He is a rotten choice to lead a scientific expedition, but his wife’s money convinces the exploration committee that he is the man for the job. Jay Nichols sees right through Cable’s bravado, but for the chance to photograph African gorillas in their natural habitat, he is more than willing to sacrifice his pride. If he is not careful, he will give up much more than that. After accidentally killing a female gorilla, Nichols is beset with shame and grief. His judgment impaired, he makes the mistake of venturing into the jungle alone with the trip leader’s wife. When they get lost, Nichols quickly finds that an angry husband is far more dangerous than any beast the jungle has to offer.
In sun-soaked Florida, Crane pursues a kidnapper in between drinks It does not take much to lure Bill Crane to Florida in the wintertime. The weather would be temptation enough, but the fact that there is money to be made and gin to be drunk makes a trip to Key Largo irresistible. His ever-soused companion, Doc Williams, at his side, Crane sets out south to find out who has been threatening millionaire playboy Penn Essex with blackmail notes, first on his pillow, then in his wallet, demanding $50,000—“or else.” But as Crane soon learns, the threat is not to Penn, but to his sister. When beautiful young Camelia is kidnapped, Crane and Doc look for traitors inside the family circle. Lurching from cocktail hour to cocktail hour, they will do everything they can to find the missing girl, knowing that murderers—and hangovers—could strike at any moment.
A vanished corpse leads a hard-drinking PI on a madcap chase More than forty corpses fill the cold Chicago basement, but no crime has been committed here. After all, there are supposed to be bodies in the city morgue. Tonight, one is attracting particular attention: a beautiful young woman whose apparent suicide captured the imagination of every newspaper editor in town. Learning how and why she died is too great a task for any cub reporter. Only Detective Bill Crane is up to the job. A few minutes after Crane wakes from a nap in the morgue, the mysterious woman’s body has disappeared. With the howls of the mental patients as a soundtrack, Crane leads the police on a wild search through the hospital and across Chicago, stopping for a nap or a cocktail whenever the situation demands. It may be a matter of life and death, but that is no reason to rush.
In Hollywood, a screenwriter gets involved in an impossible murder In a steamy tropical jungle, a sinister American woman pushes the natives too far and gets exactly what she deserves: a rusty knife buried deep in her back. At least, that is the way the movie is supposed to end. But when the loathsome starlet Caresse Garnet learns her character is about to be killed off, she refuses to die, forcing the studio to rewrite the ending the night before the scenes are to be shot. While hammering out a happy ending for Hollywood’s most reviled actress, screenwriter Richard Blake discovers a naked blonde in his driveway, sitting in a parked car and sucking down exhaust. She is the first clue in an unfathomable Hollywood mystery that will teach Caresse Garnet that though she may get to dictate when her characters die, in real life, it is not up to her.
In an eerie country house, a cruel old man is decapitated When Peter Coffin’s mysterious great-uncle Tobias summons the family to his manor in the wilds of Michigan, his aunt warns him to stay away. Peter goes anyway, arriving at the edge of the sprawling estate well after midnight. Wading through the muck in the darkness, he passes a fearsome figure on the road, and when he arrives at the front door, he is greeted by cousins bearing shotguns. An ax-murdering madman is on the loose, but just as dangerous are the creatures Peter will encounter inside the house: his family. When old Tobias is murdered, both his head and his will go missing. The police suspect the ax killer, but Peter knows better. After all, if there is one thing his aunt has taught him, it is that you should never trust a Coffin.
Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend - and disapproves of his carousing. The trio has been sent to a Chicago suburb to investigate a murder and death threats made to the family of an industrial magnate. Alternately impeded and abetted by the many attractive women of the family, Crane cracks the case in his own inimitable way, following a trail of clues including the perfume of gardenias, the lipstick marks on the dead man's face and the crimson cat.
Just days from meeting the reaper, a convicted murderer hires Chicago’s most hard-boiled PI to save his neck—before the executioner can claim it Robert Westland’s death is just around the corner when he finally decides to fight the murder rap that’s sending him to the electric chair. Fingered for his wife’s grisly demise, Westland is in a bind, and his last hope is Bill Crane, a booze-soaked detective who’s as ruthless with a quip as he is when trawling the streets for Chicago’s most brutal criminal element. Crane’s got just a few days to suss out the real killer—someone clever enough to off Westland’s wife and lock her in a room whose only key belongs to Westland himself. Fueled by an abundance of liquor and a habit of bad manners, Crane sets his sights on a cast of oddball characters among whom hides a murderer. But in 1930s Chicago, everyone’s got a secret, and the pressure is on for Crane to separate the dangerous from the truly homicidal before it’s too late.
To catch a thief, a detective has himself committed to a high-class asylum The orderlies do not need a straitjacket for Bill Crane. He is not violent, although he does have a bad habit of making embarrassing deductions about the doctors. This sarcastic, hard-drinking man has deluded himself into thinking he is Edgar Allan Poe’s great detective, C. Auguste Dupin. For this, he has been put away in a stately mental hospital on the Hudson. But Crane is not as delusional as he appears. Though he may not be Dupin, he certainly is a detective—one of the greatest, and occasionally drunkest, of them all. Sent undercover to investigate the theft of an inmate’s fortune, Crane finds the institution not as comfortable as he had hoped. When his fellow patients start dying, he must solve the murders, or risk losing his sanity after all.
From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed' So begins the most hardboiled of Latimer's novels, whose notoriety meant that it was only published in unexpurgated form in the States in 1982, 40 years after its original publication. In this classic noir novel, St Louis private eye Karl Craven, who likes his steak rare, his liquor hard and his women fallen, arrives at the small town of Paulton to protect his wealthy client's daughter from a religious cult. He soon finds himself involved with various unsavoury characters, as well as a femme fatale named Princess, and proves more than a match for the worst of them.
The job was supposed to be simple, but in this shady midwestern town, nothing is as it seems Hard-living private detective Karl Craven didn’t ask for trouble when he arrived in Paulton, Missouri—but trouble found him anyway. First it was his partner, Oke Johnson, shot in the head by a silenced rifle. Then it was the femme fatale Ginger Bolton, who took him for a wild ride his first night in town. But it’s Penelope Grayson—the sultry blonde whose uncle hired Craven to shake her loose from a local cult—who takes the prize. Penelope calls herself a Daughter of Solomon, a member of a group mixed up in everything from viticulture to gambling and prostitution. As Craven gets closer to the cult, he realizes that it isn’t the town’s only danger. To solve the case of Oke’s murder and free Penelope from the grasp of Solomon, Craven must also tangle with a crooked police chief, a treacherous lawyer, and a ruthless gangster—all primed to bring him down unless he can outwit them first.
Lifelike illustrations with arrows pointing to key field marks show readers exactly what to look for to distinguish one bird from another. Full-color illustrations and photos.
Exciting text and colorful illustrations and photos describe the physical characteristics, behaviors, and habitats of a variety of caterpillars, arranged by the categories "Smooth", "Bumpy", "Sluglike", "Horned", "Hairy", "Bristly", and "Spiny".
ngredients: one missing girl, a cult, an entombed body, and a private detective pushed with his back against the wall. Throw in a dash of raw lust and a pinch of sadomasochistic hatred. Stir violently until boil and serve cold. SOLOMON'S VINEYARD, the totally unexpurgated version of Jonathan Latimer's THE FIFTH GRAVE. Eat. Pure Pulped CLASSIX is a garishly named effort on the part of Resurrectionary Press to provide works of pulp fiction in editions that are cleanly designed and properly typset.
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